Bazaar as a client to existing Subversion repositories

[Ben Finney]

Russel Winder <russel.winder at concertant.com> writes:

> On Sat, 2008-08-09 at 18:15 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> > Several threads this year on this mailing list have chronicled my
> > poor experiences trying to use Bazaar as a client to existing
> > Subversion respositories, and (among other things) the commit
> > noise that ensued from ever-increasing property changes in the
> > repository.
> 
> There are two ways to deal with this:
> 
> 1. Ensure that the Subversion commit hook doesn't write the property
> changes.

I have no control over how the Subversion installation is set up; it's
at a hosted site providing hundreds of Subversion repositories.

> 2. Use bzr dpush

New to me.

> My experience is that using the Python script commit hook for
> Subversion, the commit emails do not have the ever increasing
> property list problem, I just get a one liner saying the property
> changed. Sites that use svnlook as the commit hook do get the huge
> emails.

Are you saying this is new since revent versions of 'bzr-svn', or that
this will be the case with any arbitrary version?

Not knowing anything about the Subversion repository setup, how can I
know what's causing the commit messages and whether it will benefit
from what you describe above?

> dpush does the whole "do not dump the Bazaar history into
> Subversion" thing, at the cost of lots of rebasing and therefore
> changing identities of commits.

I'm very much desirous of not doing history-altering changes, so
procedures involving 'rebase' aren't an option I'm interested in.
Thanks for clarifying.

> The upside is no property changes in the Subversion repository, the
> downside is that you can't sensibly branch from the Bazaar branch of
> the Subversion repository.

That's yet another reason to avoid that option then. For me, one of
the primary reasons to use Bazaar is ease of branching and sensible
merging of local and remote branches. If I lose that, Bazaar is
significantly less useful as a client to the repository.

> That is the standard model, and it works well -- but only if you
> don't get the horrible commit emails from Subversion. This is a
> Subversion installation set up issue though, it is not something
> that Bazaar is in control of.

Where can I learn more about this? I won't be the one making whatever
changes are necessary to the Subversion repository, so I need to at
least know enough to be confident that what I propose will be a
solution.

-- 
 \       “It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do |
  `\       is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument |
_o__)                        will play itself.” —Johann Sebastian Bach |
Ben Finney